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Dessert

Rice Pudding

A sweet rice pudding made with butter, sugar, and nutmeg, boiled in a cloth.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Rice and nutmeg are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 9% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,779 recipes. Both carry 4'-methylacetophenone, which smells bitter almond. The science ↓

Rice Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Boil the rice

  1. Tie the rice in a cloth, leaving room for it to swell.

  2. Boil for 1 hour.

  3. Remove and untie the cloth.

Season and boil again

  1. Stir in the butter with a spoon.

  2. Add nutmeg to taste.

  3. Add sugar.

  4. Tie it up again tightly.

  5. Boil for another hour.

  6. Remove from heat.

Serve

  1. Turn into a dish.

  2. Pour melted butter over it.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.

Explore the science

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.

  1. Rice + nutmegtop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,779 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

  2. Rice + buttertop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together9,645 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

  3. Butter + nutmegtop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together24,377 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  4. Butter + sugartop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together98,233 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  5. Nutmeg + sugartop 20% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together23,364 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-penten-3-one (fish, pungent).

Nutmeg and sugar barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 23,364 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Rice
Forms the body of the pudding as its starch thickens and sets during boiling.
Butter
Adds fat for richness and a smooth, moist texture.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and balances the flavour of the rice and butter.
Nutmeg
Adds warm aroma to the pudding.

The step that matters

Tie the rice in a cloth, leaving room for it to swell.. Rice absorbs water and expands as it cooks. If the cloth is bound too tightly, the grains cannot swell properly, so the pudding may cook unevenly or the cloth may burst.

Swap the nutmeg

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (rice, butter, sugar):

  1. Cinnamonfits better
  2. Nutmegthe original
  3. Turmericfits less well
  4. Gingerfits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against rice, butter, sugar. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.

More rice pudding recipes

Baked 88Apple 84with Meringue 40Boiled 38French 30Lemon 29 See all 1,220 →

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